Iuron: Succinct Formal Proposition
Roy S. Schestowitz
Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Version 1.0: An initial project overview
ABSTRACT
Search engine technologies have been discussed to death and further devel-
oped endlessly in the past decade. However, such engines have no so-called
"thirst for knowledge", but rather a thirst for text. We continue to live
in an age where best results for a query are produced given an input com-
prising keywords. The outcome, rather than answers or self-tailored con-
tent, is merely a linear collection of pages, whose static content resem-
bles the keywords. There is no way to guarantee, nonetheless, that such
pages will provide the desired information or provide information that is
credible.
Iuron is set to become a collection of tools for knowledge engines, which
are intended to crawl the World Wide Web. The aim is to create a semantic
entity that captures facts from a large number of pages, thereby providing
an intelligent front-end for user search. Results are generated 'on the
fly' based on acquired knowledge and are solely intended to serve individ-
ual users.
OVERVIEW
Let us think of the Internet as a collection of complex, inter-related in-
formation. More cohesively, it takes an immense number of hypotheses and
thus can contain valid, consistent knowledge. Although we can process
(scan) all the information, higher-level knowledge, which is derived from
collection of pages, is still missing. There is enough knowledge across
the World Wide Web to answer more or less any question, assuming it is not
subjective. All that is done at present is word indexing with the notion
of word proximity.
Let us face the fact that, among the more popular uses of search engines,
are pursuits for commercial companies, which provide products or services.
Results that get returned by the engines sometimes correspond to the most
valid and relevant authority for a given niche. This may be fine for in-
sight into magnitude and breadth of companies (or their Web sites), but
this equally often misleads the user.
Search engines at present fail to extend beyond a potentially morbid state
of "dominance prevails". Rather than an engine that provides users with
the most reasonable answer and/or reference to a site, it provides a Web
link to what is most cited, typically due to fraudulent practices or sub-
jective search engine optimisations.
All the all, search engines at present encourage link-related spam and
content-related spam. In worse scenarios, their backlinks-based algorithms
lead to rise in sponsored listings, whereas our natural incentive is to
prefer what would "work best for us", not what got recommended by automat-
ed tools. These tools, which work at a shallow level without understand-
ing, opt to prioritise large corporations with money to be spent on good
listings and inbound links.
Iuron is a project that addresses the issues above. First and foremost, it
converts the vast amount of information in the World Wide Web into facts.
Moreover, it serves as an impartial source for answers and is not highly
susceptible to deceit as it can discern true from false.
METHODS
There are a variety of plausible ideas, which have been expressed at some
depth in the manifestation document alongside their pitfalls. To name one
of them briefly, pages should be obtained from the World Wide Web and then
reduced to a set of facts. Facts will be assigned varying weighs depending
on credibility factors. Frequently-repeated facts will be encouraged while
falsified facts discouraged or altogether rejected. First-order logic
serves as the holy grail by which a sequence of words (elements) becomes a
set of arguments with associated semantics.
PRACTICABILITY
The fundamental approach to tacking the problem is not overly complicated.
The goal is certainly feasible, while the resources to make it practical
are the primary barrier.
Since Iuron is an Open Source project, rapid assemblage and construction
of the libraries would be rapid, making use of existing projects that fall
under the General Public Licence (GPL). In return, Iuron will provide a
potentially distributed environment, wherein any idle computer across the
world can assist crawling and report back to a main knowledge repository.
Think of it as a public-driven reciprocal effort to process and then cen-
tralise human knowledge.